Commercial automotive radars used today are based on frequency modulated continuous wave signals due to the simple and robust detection method and good accuracy. However, the increase in both the ...number of radars deployed per vehicle and the number of such vehicles leads to mutual interference, cutting short future plans for autonomous driving and active safety functionality. We propose and analyze a radar communications (RadCom) approach to reduce this mutual interference while simultaneously offering communication functionality. We achieve this by frequency division multiplexing radar and communications, where communications is built on a decentralized carrier sense multiple access protocol and is used to adjust the timing of radar transmissions. Our simulation results indicate that radar interference can be significantly reduced, at no cost in radar accuracy.
Reliable and accurate vehicle motion models are of vital importance for automotive active safety systems for a number of reasons. First of all, these models are necessary in tracking algorithms that ...provide the safety system with information. Second, the motion model is often used by the safety application to make long-term predictions about the future traffic situation. These predictions are then part of the basic data used by the system to determine if, when, and how to intervene. In this paper, we suggest a framework for designing accurate vehicle motion models. The resulting models differ from conventional models in that the expected control input from the driver is included. By also providing a methodology for a formal treatment of the uncertainties, a model structure well suited, e.g., in a tracking algorithm, is obtained. To utilize the framework in an application will require careful design and validation of submodels to calculate the expected driver control input. We illustrate the potential of the framework by examining the performance for a specific model example using real measurements. The properties are compared with those of a constant acceleration model. Evaluations indicate that the proposed model yields better predictions and that it has an ability to estimate the prediction uncertainties.
In the research on autonomous vehicles, self-localization is an important problem to solve. In this paper we present a localization algorithm based on a map and a set of off-the-shelf sensors, with ...the purpose of evaluating this low-cost solution with respect to localization performance. The used test vehicle is equipped with a Global Positioning System receiver, a gyroscope, wheel speed sensors, a camera providing information about lane markings, and a radar detecting landmarks along the road. Evaluation shows that the localization result is within or close to the requirements for autonomous driving when lane markers and good radar landmarks are present. However, it also indicates that the solution is not robust enough to handle situations when one of these information sources is absent.
Mapping stationary objects is essential for autonomous vehicles and many autonomous functions in vehicles. In this contribution the probability hypothesis density (PHD) filter framework is applied to ...automotive imagery sensor data for constructing such a map, where the main advantages are that it avoids the detection, the data association and the track handling problems in conventional multiple-target tracking, and that it gives a parsimonious representation of the map in contrast to grid based methods. Two original contributions address the inherent complexity issues of the algorithm: First, a data clustering algorithm is suggested to group the components of the PHD into different clusters, which structures the description of the prior and considerably improves the measurement update in the PHD filter. Second, a merging step is proposed to simplify the map representation in the PHD filter. The algorithm is applied to multi-sensor radar data collected on public roads, and the resulting map is shown to well describe the environment as a human perceives it.
Estimating the pose of a camera in a known scene, i.e., visual localization, is a core task for applications such as self-driving cars. In many scenarios, image sequences are available and existing ...work on combining single-image localization with odometry offers to unlock their potential for improving localization performance. Still, the largest part of the literature focuses on single-image localization and ignores the availability of sequence data. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate the potential of image sequences in challenging scenarios, e.g., under day-night or seasonal changes. Combining ideas from the literature, we describe a sequence-based localization pipeline that combines odometry with both a coarse and a fine localization module. Experiments on long-term localization datasets show that combining single-image global localization against a prebuilt map with a visual odometry / SLAM pipeline improves performance to a level where the extended CMU Seasons dataset can be considered solved. We show that SIFT features can perform on par with modern state-of-the-art features in our framework, despite being much weaker and a magnitude faster to compute. Our code is publicly available at github.com/rulllars.
In open-set semi-supervised learning (OSSL), we consider unlabeled datasets that may contain unknown classes. Existing OSSL methods often use the softmax confidence for classifying data as ...in-distribution (ID) or out-of-distribution (OOD). Additionally, many works for OSSL rely on ad-hoc thresholds for ID/OOD classification, without considering the statistics of the problem. We propose a new score for ID/OOD classification based on angles in feature space between data and an ID subspace. Moreover, we propose an approach to estimate the conditional distributions of scores given ID or OOD data, enabling probabilistic predictions of data being ID or OOD. These components are put together in a framework for OSSL, termed \emph{ProSub}, that is experimentally shown to reach SOTA performance on several benchmark problems. Our code is available at https://github.com/walline/prosub.
The task of online mapping is to predict a local map using current sensor observations, e.g. from lidar and camera, without relying on a pre-built map. State-of-the-art methods are based on ...supervised learning and are trained predominantly using two datasets: nuScenes and Argoverse 2. However, these datasets revisit the same geographic locations across training, validation, and test sets. Specifically, over \(80\)% of nuScenes and \(40\)% of Argoverse 2 validation and test samples are less than \(5\) m from a training sample. At test time, the methods are thus evaluated more on how well they localize within a memorized implicit map built from the training data than on extrapolating to unseen locations. Naturally, this data leakage causes inflated performance numbers and we propose geographically disjoint data splits to reveal the true performance in unseen environments. Experimental results show that methods perform considerably worse, some dropping more than \(45\) mAP, when trained and evaluated on proper data splits. Additionally, a reassessment of prior design choices reveals diverging conclusions from those based on the original split. Notably, the impact of lifting methods and the support from auxiliary tasks (e.g., depth supervision) on performance appears less substantial or follows a different trajectory than previously perceived. Splits can be found at https://github.com/LiljaAdam/geographical-splits
Open-set semi-supervised learning (OSSL) embodies a practical scenario within semi-supervised learning, wherein the unlabeled training set encompasses classes absent from the labeled set. Many ...existing OSSL methods assume that these out-of-distribution data are harmful and put effort into excluding data belonging to unknown classes from the training objective. In contrast, we propose an OSSL framework that facilitates learning from all unlabeled data through self-supervision. Additionally, we utilize an energy-based score to accurately recognize data belonging to the known classes, making our method well-suited for handling uncurated data in deployment. We show through extensive experimental evaluations that our method yields state-of-the-art results on many of the evaluated benchmark problems in terms of closed-set accuracy and open-set recognition when compared with existing methods for OSSL. Our code is available at https://github.com/walline/ssl-tf2-sefoss.
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have emerged as promising tools for advancing autonomous driving (AD) research, offering scalable closed-loop simulation and data augmentation capabilities. However, to ...trust the results achieved in simulation, one needs to ensure that AD systems perceive real and rendered data in the same way. Although the performance of rendering methods is increasing, many scenarios will remain inherently challenging to reconstruct faithfully. To this end, we propose a novel perspective for addressing the real-to-simulated data gap. Rather than solely focusing on improving rendering fidelity, we explore simple yet effective methods to enhance perception model robustness to NeRF artifacts without compromising performance on real data. Moreover, we conduct the first large-scale investigation into the real-to-simulated data gap in an AD setting using a state-of-the-art neural rendering technique. Specifically, we evaluate object detectors and an online mapping model on real and simulated data, and study the effects of different fine-tuning strategies.Our results show notable improvements in model robustness to simulated data, even improving real-world performance in some cases. Last, we delve into the correlation between the real-to-simulated gap and image reconstruction metrics, identifying FID and LPIPS as strong indicators. See https://research.zenseact.com/publications/closing-real2sim-gap for our project page.
Following the success of supervised learning, semi-supervised learning (SSL) is now becoming increasingly popular. SSL is a family of methods, which in addition to a labeled training set, also use a ...sizable collection of unlabeled data for fitting a model. Most of the recent successful SSL methods are based on pseudo-labeling approaches: letting confident model predictions act as training labels. While these methods have shown impressive results on many benchmark datasets, a drawback of this approach is that not all unlabeled data are used during training. We propose a new SSL algorithm, DoubleMatch, which combines the pseudo-labeling technique with a self-supervised loss, enabling the model to utilize all unlabeled data in the training process. We show that this method achieves state-of-the-art accuracies on multiple benchmark datasets while also reducing training times compared to existing SSL methods. Code is available at https://github.com/walline/doublematch.
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